The 451 Research Take on Orbitera

Everything seemingly happens at once in the technology field. Take for instance the buzz around cloud services companies and their growing dominance of the software as a service market. Then examine how one task – and one group of tireless experts at an innovative company – are changing cloud commerce.

According to a study released May 12 by 451 Research in Boston, Orbitera is that company and usage-based cloud billing solutions are its specialty. With what 451 calls “IP around the process technology Orbitera uses, the company claims that some 60,000 enterprise stacks have been launched using it.”

In the simplest terms, this means Orbitera’s approach is actually working and people are taking note. Not because Orbitera is better, but because they’ve become better by identifying a problem that needed a solution. With a current focus on billing and cost optimization, the study goes on to say “Orbitera could be positioned as a platform for broader digital ecosystem management, thereby expanding its overall opportunity.”

Putting this environment and the challenge in context isn’t difficult. IT producers and ISVs are faced with supporting cloud and digital processes. But what they face is a slew of billing changes required when implementing cloud solutions. They don’t have the architecture to handle it – especially if you consider the need for flexible pricing and delivery, the volume of data and the need to run on third-party platforms.

Jump across the aisle to companies who serve up traditional IT products and their financial and procurement tools weren’t set up to make detailed cloud billing a reality…or even a possibility. Orbitera has followed Amazon Web Services’ model and is reducing the friction in commerce. It’s cloud commerce at its best for all parties involved.

Examining the business side and the technology, 451 explained how Orbitera targets its clients and the benefits the company delivers. Right from the study…

“Orbitera is targeting its Cloud Commerce Platform at software vendors and resellers (including AWS resellers) that provide consumption billing to their customers and tools for packaging services together (such as a package of software, RDS, EC2, MySQL and managed services that a provider might put together for customers). The idea is to deliver an AWS experience with a single package of services and a single bill. Orbitera also targets enterprises, enabling them to look like ISPs, which is how employees are now using software and services.”

Then come the ISVs…

“For ISVs, Orbitera drives recurring revenue through consumption billing and control of cloud e-commerce. For the IT channel, the company manages n-tier billing of high-volume usage-based services and packages services from multiple vendors. For enterprises, it governs usage of consumption software and services and optimizes spending.”

Wrapping up its insightful piece, 451 says “Everything Orbitera does is based on its billing engine, its dating engine and marketplace. The ISV gets the marketplace and presents this to the customer – the ISV’s ecosystem can also use the marketplace to sell their products as well. Orbitera bills for cloud subscriptions and automates invoicing – integrating with existing systems. Crucially, Orbitera’s model is n-tier. It is able to expose the relevant mechanisms to different participants in the channel and manage billing and contracts across them. It is a multi-tenant SaaS application and also available as a managed, single-tenant hosted implementation.”

If you’d like your own copy of the entire 451 Research report, you can download it here.